


catch your dream

by dogworldchampion



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV), Parks and Recreation
Genre: Crossover, Democratic Primary Debate, F/M, Kid Fic, This Got Out Of Hand Fast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 05:46:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19387729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogworldchampion/pseuds/dogworldchampion
Summary: in which amy santiago and jake peralta watch a presidential primary debate with their children, and one of those children is enamored with governor knope of indiana.





	catch your dream

**Author's Note:**

> i would like to blame first and foremost the democratic primary debates, for being on. secondly, i blame mike schur for creating a universe in which such crossovers are possible. i would also like to thank mike schur for the beautiful idea of jake and amy watching leslie knope run for president.

“Welcome to the first debate of the 2036 election! My name is Cecile Stafford, and with me tonight is my co-moderator Cooper Liddell. We’re thrilled to welcome you to this exciting primary contest--” 

“MOM!” Ana’s shout from the kitchen table drowns out the TV. “I can't find my folder!” 

“Oh! I think I saw it earlier!” Jake shouts back from the master bedroom down the hall. 

“Um...where?” Ana sounds surprised--his father loses things even more frequently than he does, and only twice in the thirteen year-old’s memory has her father ever been the one to find something lost. 

“UNDER YOUR BUTT!” Jake’s uproarious laughter draws eye rolls from his wife and older daughter, seated side-by-side on the couch, and a giggle that matches his own from the small boy seated between them. Rey has a journal open on her lap, a pencil (she would never _dare_ use a pen on the couch--those things can _stain_ ) already scratching away at the top of a new page. Her social studies teacher promised her extra credit for her thoughts on the debate, and she’ll be damned if she isn’t going to earn it. 

Her mother pipes up from next to her, for the benefit of eight year-old Eli, curled up in the crook of her arm. “ _Jake_ , potty words stay in the…?” 

“Potty,” comes the somewhat subdued response from the bedroom. Satisfied, Amy turns her attention back to the kitchen. 

“Ana, did you check your backpack? It’s by the front door.” 

Ana’s sigh of annoyance is audible, even over the audience applause coming from the TV’s top-of-the-line surround sound speakers (Jake had purchased them in order to better appreciate _Avatar_ in all its cinematic glory). “ _Mom_. I already checked there.” 

“Well--” Amy starts to reply, ready to list the other places where her seventh-grader habitually leaves her possessions (it’s truly a miracle how easily Jake and Ana manage to lose things in an apartment so small she has to share a bathroom with her teenage daughters). 

“AHA!” Ana cuts her off triumphantly. Then, her voice turns sheepish. “I found it.” 

“Where?” Amy asks, a hint of smugness in her voice betraying her certainty that the folder was in her daughter’s sequin backpack, thrown unceremoniously by the door five hours before. 

Ana’s voice is sheepish. “...I was sitting on it,” she admits reluctantly, sticking her head around the door to the living room. 

Then, a clatter from the bedroom startles all of them. Jake emerges with a triumphant shout, “I was right! It was under your butt!” 

None of them hear him, though. They’re all too busy staring--while they’d been peacefully doing the dishes, Jake had been pulling a Tupperware bin of costumes out from the hall closet and adorning himself with every bit of red-white-and-blue attire the Santiago-Peralta family possessed. 

“What?” he says, in response to the four pairs of eyes trained on him. “I had to get ready for the _debate_!” On the word debate, he leaps into the air, doing his best to imitate his fifteen-year-old ballerina daughter. He lands loudly, rattling the decorative plates hung on the wall behind him, and looks up at his family, a mohawk wig worn six years ago to Charles’ Fourth of July barbecue sitting crooked so his graying curls are visible underneath. 

The entire family pauses for a second, a commercial about some adult-onset asthma medication droning on in the background. Then, everyone is laughing. Jake hops on the sofa next to his daughter, bouncing everyone around while his son’s cheeks turn rosy pink with his deep belly laugh and his more serious daughter’s soft giggle fills the room. 

Jake and Eli are still laughing, Jake’s wig now perched on Eli’s much smaller head, covering his eyes, when a sudden swell in patriotic music and applause jerks them back to reality. 

Rey has her hand on the volume button, eyeing them defiantly. “It’s _starting,_ ” she informs her father seriously as the speakers approach their maximum volume. 

Ana, now laying on the floor with the previously-lost folder full of crumpled pages of math homework, grabs a pillow to cover her ears with an eye roll as Amy snags the remote from Rey. “Quick, turn it down!” she says, still breathless from laughter. “Before the neighbors call again!”

She switches the volume back to acceptable levels, but Rey doesn’t even seem to notice. Jake leans over and notices that she has columns for each candidate in her notebook, with her neat handwriting listing names, previous qualifications, and current offices. 

“Our senator’s running, you know,” Rey announces. “Foster Cromwell. He’s supposed to win. It’d be cool to have another New York president. I think I’d vote for him.” 

“You shouldn’t vote for someone just because they’re from your state,” Amy explains. “You want to vote for the person with the best _ideas_.” 

“But you think he has good ideas! You voted for him last year!” Rey retorts. 

“I do,” Amy concedes. “Senator Cromwell is very smart. But let’s see who else is on stage before we start committing our votes!” 

Rey nods, writing furiously in her notebook as Harris finishes his opening statement. Seven candidates follow him, with opening statements so rehearsed and identical that Jake starts to nod off by the time the eighth candidate gets her minute. 

“My name is Leslie Knope, and I’m the governor of Indiana. I may be new to the national political scene, but I’ve worked in government longer than any of the people on stage with me. My career began in the local Parks and Recreation department in--” 

Something in her voice makes Jake snap to attention. His eyes open, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see Amy sitting up straighter, too. Even Ana, pretending to be entirely disengaged from her spot on the carpet, has stopped writing. 

The moment only lasts a few seconds, but it captures Jake’s attention. The tiny blonde woman on the far edge of the stage is electric, and her story about a swing, national parks, conservation, and hard work feels like it could be much longer than a minute. 

The audience in the room seems to agree, with a swell of applause so loud that Amy has to turn the volume down another few notches. 

“Who is she?” Amy asks her daughter. 

Rey consults her notebook. “Governor of Indiana. She used to work at the Department of the Interior, and in the National Parks Service before that. She’s from...Pow-nee, I think is how you say it.” 

Eli laughs. “Pow-nee’s _funny_.” 

“Pow-NEE, Pow-NEE,” Jake repeats, poking his son in the stomach on each syllable while his son giggles. 

“Shh!” Rey shoots a death glare--scarily like Amy’s--at her father as the moderators ask the first question. 

Jake rapidly gets lost again in the technical language about public options, data privacy, and global trade pacts, so he settles on watching his wife, who clearly seems to know what’s going on. She’s enthralled, fascinated by the detailed policy discussion. Meanwhile, Rey is scribbling furiously. 

“Governor Knope, one of your most-discussed achievements in Indiana is your prison reform bill, which aided the state’s recovery from the opioid crisis and restructured policing in the face of drug crimes. “Which such reforms are necessary at the national level, and how would you pursue them?” 

As Governor Knope launches into a response about her work with the local police chief and how that translated into statewide work on bias training and accountability, Rey stops writing, her jaw slowly dropping. 

When Governor Knope finishes, the debate cuts to a commercial break, and Rey turns sharply to her parents. 

“Grandpa Ray talks about that stuff _all the time_!” 

Amy smiles at her daughter. “He does. He’s worked hard on some of those policies in the NYPD for years.” 

“But government people do it, _too_?” 

“They can.”

“Do government people in New York do it?” Ana pipes up. 

“Sometimes, but not as much as we want them to. That’s why Grandpa Ray has been working so hard--to change those things from the inside, since people aren’t changing them from the outside.” 

“Oh.” Rey looks thoughtful. “Do you have to be a governor to do that? Change it from the outside?” 

Amy looks thoughtfully at her daughter before starting an explanation about the endless nonprofit groups, researchers, and government employees who help elected officials make decisions like Governor Knope’s. She’s quickly cut off, though, by the music indicating that the debate has returned, which cues her daughter’s attention back to the candidates and her notebook. 

* * *

Amy’s surprised the next day when her daughter brings home five books from her high school library about the history of government and criminal justice reform. Rey dives in headfirst, and it’s all she talks about for months. Later that year, Amy’s just as surprised when Governor Knope surges from behind in the polls and captures the nomination, and even more surprised when she denies a strong Republican president a second term. 

By April of her oldest daughter’s senior year, Amy’s only a bit surprised when Rey confidently announces that she’d like to turn down NYU and move to Washington, D.C., and study political science. When Jake and Amy are on a train back from Georgetown the next fall, having just moved Rey into her new dorm, Jake can’t stop crying about their baby moving away. Amy smiles as she pats his shoulder as their two younger children roll their eyes. 

And six months after that, when her daughter calls screaming about an internship with President Knope’s special commission on national criminal justice reform, Amy’s hardly surprised at all. 


End file.
